August 2002

NetNewsWire Lite 1.0b21 fixes some bugs and adds a few small new features. The most important bug fix is probably that you can now mark the current headline as unread. (See the change notes for more info.)

Ben Hammersley writes in the UK Guardian: “I don’t mean to brag but it’s 8.30am and I’ve already got up to date with 75 different websites. I’ve read all their headlines, perused the articles of interest, and I’m only half way through my coffee.”

I’m not much for chat. But I’ve been seeing that other developers are doing chat sessions with their users about their software—to handle support, bug reports, feature requests, answer questions, etc.

So I thought I’d try out iChat (now that I’m Jaguar-ified).

But... do I understand correctly that I have to pay somebody some money? It appears that one needs either an AOL or .Mac account. True? Or is there some way around the requirement that I open my wallet that I just haven’t realized?

Update 11:45 a.m.: Thanks to Eric Tilton’s help I have signed up for a free AIM account. Cool. My screen name is pbrentsimmons. (The “p” stands for Peter, my first name.)

I’ve been making progress on a new NetNewsWire feature—an (optional, off by default) way to read subscriptions. Instead of separating title from description, they’re displayed together, as in Jason Kottke’s feature request.

Obviously there’s more to do—but, for those who are looking forward to this feature, here’s an early screen shot to whet your appetite.

Mark Pilgrim is right on when he writes that RSS discovery is a usability issue. A user should never have to find and copy the RSS URL for a site.

NetNewsWire supports RSS discovery. (Like Mark’s Python RSS finder it checks for a <link...> tag, though it differs on what it does next if it doesn’t find one.)

I think every RSS reader will eventually support RSS discovery. The little XML buttons on people’s websites will eventually be obsolete as sites more and more include the necessary <link...> tag. However, those XML buttons are totally still needed: they’re an important step in RSS adoption.

Here’s how things work for me now. When I’m at a site I want to subscribe to, I copy-and-paste its home page URL into NetNewsWire’s subscription dialog. The app then searches for the RSS feed for that site. If it finds it, great. If it doesn’t find it then I delete the failed subscription—even if the site actually does have a hidden-away RSS feed somewhere. I don’t go looking for it manually: it’s too much trouble. And thus I don’t read that site.

But of course even the above scenario is too many steps: ideally, when I’m at a site I want to subscribe to, I should be able to choose a menu command to subscribe to that site. (Or maybe it’s a bookmarklet, or a contextual menu command—some Subscribe to Site command that’s always in the same easily-accessible place.)

Radio UserLand and AmphetaDesk (and perhaps other RSS readers) have a great feature where you can click on an icon on a page that then subscribes you to that site. That’s a hundred times better than having to hunt for an RSS feed and then copying the URL into your reader app. But it’s still not quite the best scenario—after all, you still have to look for that icon, which may or may not be there. And you have to run an HTTP server on your desktop, which you may not want to do or may not be allowed to do.

To re-iterate: no human should ever have to find an RSS feed. That’s the kind of thing computers are good at. No human should ever have to see an RSS feed except out of curiousity (or if they’re debugging their own software). RSS should be completely hidden.

What this means in plain English is that, when you go to manually subscribe to a site, you can type just its URL, or even just a domain like www.someblog.com, and NetNewsWire will without fuss go ahead and find the RSS feed for you.

It doesn’t always work, unfortunately, but it works a great deal of the time. And it’s oddly addicting. (At least for me the developer.) Last night I spent some time going through the list of weblogs at weblogs.com just trying one site after another looking for RSS feeds. I found tons.

I’m seeking Blogrolling.com OPML files to make sure they’re supported by NetNewsWire. So if you have one—or more than one, the more the better—and if you don’t mind sharing, please email them to me at brent at ranchero dot com or let me know a download URL. Thanks!

Update: I have enough Blogrolling.com files now. Thanks to all who sent them.

Here’s the problem, however—Blogrolling.com OPML files do not contain RSS URLs, so importing them as NetNewsWire subscription won’t work. Total bummer.

The early ’70s was the glam era, the Ziggy Stardust era, when it was fashionable to be both gay and from outer space. It was the era of T. Rex, Mott the Hoople, Roxy Music... and Another Pretty Face.

Another Pretty Face? Okay, they didn’t hit it big, so you probably never heard of them. They were my uncle’s band. If you were a college student in Pennsylvania or New York in those days you may have seen them. Maybe.

My uncle once told me a story about how, after a gig in New York City featuring several bands, they were all sitting around drinking and talking.

A guy from one of the other bands was saying how much they loved Another Pretty Face, how they thought the act was so cool—especially the whole boys-wearing-makeup thing.

We gotta try that, said the guy. He seemed really hyped. Gotta do the makeup thing.

(Surely you can see the punchline coming?)

The guy was from KISS, a pre-makeup KISS, KISS before anyone knew who they were.

The next beta of NetNewsWire Lite (probably a few days away) will support a new feature: groups.

You’ll be able to organize your feeds via drag-and-drop. When you select a group, then all the unread items in all the feeds in that group are displayed. This way you can have multiple aggregate views.

Here’s a quote: “Despite the boom, Seattle always seemed of two minds on the new economy. With its blue-collar Boeing roots, its long line of stern Scandinavian loggers and fishermen, its suspicion of ostentation, the city spent the ’90s getting used to the new big thinkers—people like Glaser, Howard Schultz at Starbucks and Jeff Bezos at Amazon.com—embracing them, really, while wondering if it should be holding its nose.”

I’m working on a new feature for NetNewsWire this morning—Doc processing.

Doc in this case doesn’t stand for document: it stands for Doc Searls. If you use an RSS reader to read his site you may have noticed that his RSS feed is always just one big item with a bunch of HTML. So the software will handle it as a special case: it will break it up into individual items.

I donated $20 to Mac Net Journal today. Rob’s doing a great job with this site—his weblog has become my primary site for Mac news. So what’s $20 to help keep Mac Net Journal going? A large pizza and some cokes or a couple pitchers of beer. It’s totally worth it.

One of the metaphors I’ve always used when working on something—an application, a website, an article—is noise.

When something isn’t right, it makes a noise.

For instance, when I designed this site I worked on it until it was silent. (Your taste may vary, of course.)

Another example: this morning I’ve been dealing with menu item and toolbar item validation in an application I’m working on. When a menu item is enabled but it should be disabled it makes a crackly buzzing sound like a bug killer light.

It’s my belief that these things make a huge difference in user experience—the little things have to be right, or the app is noisy.

It’s a screen shot of a test app for a Cocoa class that parses OPML files. The OPML class I developed for NetNewsWire—so that it could import subscriptions files—is now available as Open Source (BSD license).

Of course, the more interesting use for OPML is web directories. This little test app has everything you need to get started on creating a cool directory browser—it shows not just how to parse OPML but how to hook it up to an outline view and how to make headlines double-clickable (so they open in the browser). Very simple. I hope someone takes it and runs with it.

Note that it’s not an OPML editor, just a reader. Creating a mutable OPML class is left as an exercise.

That’s a damn good question. Me, I don’t. Or at least not as often as I used to.

RSS readers may make it less likely that one will actually go to a site, which means the site can’t (as easily) present its various enticements to get you to stick around. It can’t grab you as easily, and that may make it more difficult for the site to make money. (Or pay for itself, at least.)

Or, at least I think that’s what the point is. There is an important issue here, but I just may not be able to articulate it too well.

I’ve been including Mac Net Journal in the default list of NetNewsWire subscriptions because I think it’s a good site and I want people to know about it and read it who may otherwise miss it. In other words, I’m trying to help build the popularity of the site, help make it worth Rob’s time.